for people who have the habit of opening unreal files that are on another computer on a network, and are having this problem here with UE 5.1:
“Failed to open descriptor file”
I’ll leave here the solution I found, very simple. You just have to go to the folder where your project is, right-click and select the option “Map network drive”
You will choose the letter of the drive you want to create, leave the option “Reconnect at sign-in” checked and click on finish.
Windows will create a location as if it were a drive on the computer itself, opening the file through that drive I no longer had the “Failed to open descriptor file” problem, everything worked correctly.
Yes, for dummies
I had the same error but in different situation, I was working locally on my PC, not in network. Opening the uproject file directly worked, but when I launched Local Windows Debugger in Visual Studio then the error occured.
I managed to fix my problem the “hard way”
I removed the .sln and .vsconfig files and removed the directories: .vs, Binaries, DerivedDataCache, Intermediate and Saved.
Then I generated Visual Studio files again and it works now
Yes I know, this was brute force but I got the job done
This error also occurs when you launch to your connected device and forget to launch in development mode. You cannot launch in shipping mode or you get this error.
Had this issue myself which directed me to this thread.
In my case it was pretty simple to solve. For me, the issue was that the project was looking at the D-drive whereas my project currently exists on my E-drive. I could simply open the Properties of the project from Visual Studio by right-clicking, navigate to Debugging, and in the Command Arguments, I saw it was looking for the uproject on the D-drive. I simply had to change this to the E-drive.
